Richard Edmonds speaks at POW camp commemoration

Translation of the speech made by Richard Edmonds on the 25. November 2017 at the commemoration held to remember the suffering of the German prisoners-of-war at the site of the Feld des Jammers (Field of extreme distress), Bretzenheim, near Bad Kreuznach, Germany. Note here that the Canadian historian, James Bacque, in his book, Other Losses describes the hardship suffered at this location, the Rheinwiesen prisoner of war camp, where hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of the US Army were corralled for months on end in the exposed open-air, and without any proper sanitary arrangements in place and fed on bare starvation rations.

Dear German friends, my name is Richard Edmonds and I am British. I would like to say here that it was the British Establishment which twice both in 1914 and then just twenty five years later in 1939 declared War against Germany, and without any good reason whatsoever.

We all know that the two World Wars were the most destructive wars that history has ever witnessed. The British Establishment’s declarations of war led to, in effect, the whole world attacking Germany. It is astounding that one nation could withstand for a total of ten years against such a combined massive force. As the French patriot and founder of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen said, the Germans are the martyr-folk of Europe.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Second World War did not end on May 1945. Neither at the Rheinwiesen POW camp nor anywhere else in post-War Germany was there an end to the suffering. The War continued: in the place of bombs and bullets there now came all the crimes and injustices that men are capable of.

Here I would like to quote the German Professor of the University of Munich, Dr. Franz Seidler, from his book, Das Recht in Siegerhand (Victors’ Justice):

“It has taken more than a half century for it to become permissible to condemn the Western Allies (Britain and the USA) for the crimes that they committed in the Second World War against the rules of war and against the treatment of civilians during and after that war. The Western Allies bombed German residential areas with the cold blooded purpose of attempting to break the moral of the population and the Western Allies cared nothing for the five hundred thousand victims who lost their lives. The Western Allies shot thousands of German POWs. After the capitulation of the German armed forces the Western Allies denied German POWs their rights as prisoners of war as guaranteed by international conventions, and left them to rot in open fields (as at the Rheinwiesen camp). The German POWs were employed illegally by the Allies as slave-labour. The Western Allies approved and supported the greatest act of genocide ever committed in Europe when 15 million Germans were expelled from their ancestral home-lands. The Western Allies ruthlessly looted German industries and stole German technical know-how. They did nothing as hundreds of thousand of Germans, denied adequate rations and heating, succumbed to hunger and cold. The Western Allies imprisoned three million Germans in camps. All this after the War was over.” Quote ends.

Dr. Seidler speaks here of the violations committed during the Second World War by the Western Allies against the Rules Of war and Conventions on Human Rights. Amongst the many other subjects in his book, Dr. Seidler deals with the Nuremberg Tribunal and condemns both morally and from a judicial stand-point the trial which the triumphant Allies (the USA, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France) had organized at the end the War against the militarily defeated German leaders. Question who were the judges and prosecutors at this trial of the defeated Germans ? Answer: the British were the judges: the British who had mercilessly bombed Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin; the Americans were the judges: the Americans who destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atom-bombs at the very end of the War; the judges were Soviet Russians, and everybody knows of the crimes committed by the Soviet Russians (including the rape of two million German girls and women at the War’s end). I quote again Dr. Seidler: “The Allies’ Nuremberg trial of the defeated German leaders was a crime itself and a violation of all the rules of law of the civilised world.

But it was not only the German professor, Dr. Seidler, alone who more than half a century later condemned the the Nuremberg Tribunal of the former Allies. No, already at the very time that the trials were taking place in 1945-46, leading Americans publicly condemned the trials. For example, the top number one judge of the USA, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Harlan F, Stone, condemned the Allies’ trial as “Lynch-justice”, and leading US politician, US Senator Robert Taft, condemned that trial as a “perversion of Justice, and that America’s participation constituted a blot on the honour of the USA”; Taft went further, he predicted that in years to come, Europeans would condemn the USA for its participation. So spoke US Senator Robert Taft in 1945.

Question: Why did leading American contemporaries speak so sharply against the trial organised by the Allies in terms of “Lynch-justice and perversion of Justice” ? Answer: because at the very time of the trials rumours became too loud to be ignored that Germans held in captivity by the Americans were being tortured by American interrogators for the purpose of “softening” them up in order that they be compliant witnesses for the prosecution. To cut a long story short, the American judge, Edward van Roden, was send from the USA to investigate officially the conditions of Germans held in American captivity. Judge van Roden discovered that under interrogation, 137 Germans had had their testicles crushed beyond repair. On his return to the USA, Judge van Roden held a number of press-conferences where he revealed what he had seen and learnt.

But amongst the Western Allies it was not only the Americans who tortured defenceless Germans. The British authorities also tortured German prisoners, who it was intended should serve the Allies’ interests as defendants or witnesses in the trials that were being prepared. In 2002 the journalist, Fritjof Meyer, an editor of the (left-liberal) German weekly news-magazine, der SPIEGEL, published an article in the German government publication, OSTEUROPA, which dealt with the case of the former Auschwitz camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess. The SPIEGEL journalist described exactly how Hoess had been captured after the War by the British occupation authorities and how these had tortured Hoess almost to the point of death in order to extract from the former Auschwitz camp commandant the “confession” that he, Rudolf Hoess had murdered four million at Auschwitz,.

It is clear that the SPIEGEL journalist does not believe a word of the confession extracted from the former Auschwitz commandant. The SPIEGEL journalist, Fritjof Meyer entitled his article published in the May 2002 edition of OSTEUROPA, “The number of victims of Auschwitz”, and wrote – and I quote his words – “Four Million victims in Auschwitz – a product of the war-propaganda of the Allies” The SPIEGEL journalist went further and quoted in his article, a statement made by the Polish expert, Waclaw Dlugoborski. Dlugoborski had been the Director of Research at the (Communist) Polish government memorial centre at Auschwitz. Dlugoborski had written in the (left-liberal) German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in September 1998, and I quote:

“Shortly before the end of the War a Soviet Commission of Enquiry determined, without any further research into the matter, that the number of victims of Auschwitz was four million,” Dlugoborski continued, “although from the beginning there were doubts as to the accuracy of this estimation, the estimation became dogma. Up to the year 1989 (the year of the collapse of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe) it was forbidden to question the number of four million murdered at Auschwitz; staff at the Auschwitz memorial centre were threatened with disciplinary procedures if they did so.” Although from the very beginning there were doubts as to the accuracy of the estimation.

The SPIEGEL journalist Meyer concluded with: “In February 1946 the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, Major Leo Smirnov, claimed that four million been murdered at Auschwitz.” A product of war-propaganda.

Friends, it is clear that by all standards of decency, the governments of the former war-time Allies, the British government, the American government and the Russian government should officially apologize to the German people for the crimes committed by their predecessors.